The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Advances in computing, networking and related technologies have led to proliferation in the availability of multi-media contents, and the manners the contents are consumed. Today, multi-media contents may be available from fixed medium (e.g., Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)), broadcast, cable operators, satellite channels, Internet, and so forth. User may consume contents with a wide range of content consumption devices, such as, television set, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, smartphone, or other stationary or mobile devices of the like. In addition to the contents themselves, ease of consumption remains an important factor to the overall user experience and satisfaction.
A significant conflict continues to exist between content providers and content consumers is the provision and viewing of secondary content, such as, commercials/advertisements, provided with free primary content. Content providers of free primary content often want the content consumers to watch the secondary content. Content providers also would like to target the secondary content to the content consumers, e.g., based on the demographics, interests and/or locations of the content consumers, especially in the case of free primary content provided through the Internet. Today, the secondary content are typically selected and integrated with the primary content at the head end, the content distributor side, before they are distributed to the content consumer's content consumption devices. Typically, the secondary content are intrusively interleaved or superimposed on the primary content, which is not very user friendly.